Christopher Harris in conversation with Academy Museum Chief Artistic and Programming Officer Jacqueline Stewart.

Recently restored by the Academy Film Archive, Christopher Harris’s memorable and evocative short feature, still/here, employs striking black-and-white 16mm cinematography and reflective associative editing to explore the social and infrastructural failings at work in the predominantly Black, under-resourced north side of St. Louis, Missouri. Evoking history and community in an approach mixing formal observation with subjective impressionism, this multi-layered experimental film essay is further enhanced by an illuminating collage soundtrack which incorporates quotidian sounds, music, interviews, and ambient recordings.

Rather than explore his themes through explanatory voiceovers or didactic montage, Harris’s film takes a much more experiential approach guided by time and texture, allowing us to see thoughtfully through his eyes and draw our own connections through the images and evidence he provides us. Sequences of urban decay and depopulated domestic spaces are framed and connected through his attentive lens, asking the audience to form conclusions about what we’re seeing, as well as to become aware of our own voyeurism. In what ways are we bystanders to or participants in the systems that allowed this to happen?

Accompanying the feature will be another recent Harris restoration produced in collaboration with Canyon Cinema, the optically printed, high-contrast short Reckless Eyeballing. In this visually arresting work of radical rephotography, Harris draws on various cinematic and media depictions of Black outlaws and weaves them into a complex collage that complicates the tropes and implications of the “threat” of the Black gaze.